March 20, 2007

I LEARNED THREE things after reading the account of the 15-year-old boy who tagged a bus while Los Angeles' mayor was on board.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, along with a busload of other officials, were at the Santee Education Complex in South L.A. to celebrate the successful relocation of a bus stop from two blocks away from the school to directly behind of the school complex.

So the first thing I learned was this: Moving a bus stop two blocks is so complicated a process, so thorny a political problem, that when it actually happens — when the steel pole with the Metro sign is dug up from one spot and planted a few hundred yards away in another spot — it's time for everyone involved to celebrate the moment, get in a bus, drive down to the spot and congratulate themselves.

While doing so, the mayor and his party were surprised to notice that a sophomore at the school was celebrating in his own way, by tagging the bus, which, translated for our Brentwood and Pacific Palisades readers, means scrawling his nickname — "Zoner" — on the window.

The snag: The mayor and his guests were inside the bus at the time. Zoner, I guess, didn't look before he tagged. One thing they don't seem to offer at the Santee Learning Complex, apparently, is a class called Awareness of the World Around You. ...

On the other hand, in the aftermath of the event, Zoner's act doesn't look like such a boneheaded move. The bad news is, the kid will probably have to do some kind of community service. The good news, though, is that Villaraigosa quickly realized that while Zoner is obviously a young man in trouble, he's also got a certain reckless charm. So the mayor graciously offered to mentor him, help him make better choices, guide him to more productive activities. So Zoner goes from tagger to mayor's new best friend. Not bad, mobility-wise. ...

The third thing I learned, then, is this: If you want to move up in the world, or get somebody's attention, vandalism is probably the answer. If, say, you're an aspiring writer with a couple of solid action-picture pitches, my advice would be to find out where producer Jerry Bruckheimer parks his car, and then deface it.

10 comments:

It also makes Mayor Tony look like a loser. He can't even keep taggers from defacing the bus while he's on it for a photo op.

Mayor Tony's dismantling of the LAPD should give every business and homeowner in LA great pause. There's a lot of ruin in a nation and a lot in a city. LA Latino Gangs are so rampant and brazen they'll tag even when Mayor Tony is engaging in his high profile media events. What will they do when cameras and police are not around?

Of course that will only make areas around LA that have hard-nosed police (Simi Valley) and no tolerance for gang bangers more valuable.

The "he" here is the principal of the school, who appears to be as fucking clueless as the editorial board of the LAT, who never change their tune, no matter how often their newspaper documents the direness of the demographic trends there.

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